World of Warcraft: A look at the Battle.net authenticator

[fayainz]

I looked at my transaction history on Paypal, it clearly shows one payment that I made for $0.99, there was NO sms to say my phone is incompatible, and there has been no payments back into my paypal account over the last 3 months.

The application was downloaded but doesn't run on my phone. It's possible, I think, that blizzard asumes the application works on my phone, however I get no prompt when I login to WoW.

[Lydon]

What exactly does it, or does it not do? Does it just not run at all or what?

[Blackhand]

Sure! There are 2 possible reasons

1. The developed it for iphone first, and made it free. They noticed it was popular and though of all the money they missed out on

2. Maybe iphone realized the size of WoW, and figured this would be cool for i-users, so they struck a deal with blizzard?

Business world, everything had to be decided on, and keeping customer loyalty and profits are the 2 biggest things.

While I believe this may be a contributing factor, it is only the surface. I've personally had to deal with mobile phone development myself.

It is a bitch. The iphone is one simple consistent platform that is easy and fast to develop for, see 9 year old kids outearning their parents by making games and software for it.

Other phones.... other phones... don't get me started. They all use Java to run custom applications, HOWEVER, it is up to the manufacturer of the phone to implement the java runtime on the phone and they have yet to do a proper job of it. Think of this like the difference between Firefox, Opera, IE7 and IE8, they're all supposed to do the same thing, but the developer often has to specially cater for each. Now, think of each bloody phone out there as another browser to cater for. Its a compatibility nightmare.

My point is, it is very expensive to do mobile phone development, since each and every phone almost always needs its own corner case coding.

[Lydon]

They could have gone the Symbian and Windows Mobile routes and made them free, however...

[Riaan]

does anyone know if there is a HTC version of this ??

[Lydon]

I think there is. The website I linked to in the article will tell you. It's very phone-specific.